http://shawjonathan.wordpress.com/2010/04/09/maiden-pirate/

Jennifer Maiden's previous book, [Friendly Fire], included a ‘cluster’ of poems featuring the ficitonal characters George Jeffreys and Clare Collins. Clare killed her two younger siblings when she was nine years old. George has been her probation officer and is now her mentor, friend and lover. As Jennifer Maiden explained in an introduction to the poems, through these characters ‘the horror-inhibited portions of [her] brain might speak’. First, in a prose piece, they were in the New York of 9/11. Then came the six poems, each of them beginning: 'George Jeffreys woke up in [Kabul/Kandahar/London/ Berlin/the White House/Baghdad]. / George Bush Junior was on the TV, obsessed / as usual with Baghdad' and then going to unexpected places.

In the five years since then, as seen in this book, she has written four more ‘George Jeffreys woke up’ poems (in New Orleans, Rio, Beirut, and a Pirates’ Ship), which are collected here along with one in which ‘Clare Collins woke up in the Paris Hilton’, eight in which Eleanor Roosevelt or Hilary Clinton wakes up somewhere, and one each for Florence Nightingale’s pet owl Athena, Mother Teresa and Grahame Greene, who wake up respectively ‘on the wild cliffs of Crimea’, ‘in London, at /The Inquest for Princess Diana’ and ‘in the Saigon Caravelle/ Hotel in 2006′.

That might sound like a bit of a bore, but it’s actually quite the contrary. Those first-line awakenings are launching pads for a wide range of poems: a couple come close to being straight action-adventure, others enter strange supernatural fantasy worlds, and always there’s a serious play with the big news of the day. (I would have liked the poems to be dated, which would have made it possible to find out easily at what stage of George W Bush’s foreign adventures the conversations in the poems were taking place. For instance, I seem to remember that the bit where George talks about torture in the Abu Ghraib prison was written before those sensational photographs were made public – and this surely affects how the poem is read.)

Maybe one day I’ll figure out why I love Maiden’s poetry so much. One thing that I can tell is that she writes about the public world, the one we see on the television, and makes sharp observations and judgements about it. Her portraits of George W Bush and Condoleezza Rice are wonderful. In this volume, there are Jim Cairns, Hillary Clinton and, most touchingly, Don Dunstan. She argues about the nature of poetry, and fame, without every disappearing up her own kazoo. She reports conversations with her daughter without going cute – in fact, the poems involving those conversations generally astonish in the way they bring disparate elements together. ( )